Marking up Paragraphs

The lowly paragraph tag is probably the most neglected tag in all of HTML. Who wants to slow the production process to include those annoying <p> and </p> symbols before and after every single block of running text? Yet the benefits for making the extra effort can be extraordinary. CSS provides a wide range of typographic possibilities for running text, even the least of which is a significant improvement over the cramped, unattractive blocks of poorly set lines of type that HTML spits out (see Figure 40.2). The key to harnessing CSS is to mark up your document properly, and that means marking everything that is supposed to be a paragraph as a paragraph.

Figure 40.2. HTML paragraphs are so unattractive that it's hard to blame you for ignoring proper markup. But get into the habit of marking up paragraphs anyway so that you can use CSS to improve your site's typography.